Mister Jack

Some of you may remember that I played the hell out of Nioh 2. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in it and even now I'll still pick it up once in a while. Well, I tried the Wo Long PS5 demo to see how the gameplay compares and I came away with the following conclusions. 1) This is more of an answer to Sekiro than Dark Souls. While you can still block, it only takes a few blocked hits to leave you staggered and so this game strongly encourages you to get used to timed parries. Not only will parrying open up an attack window for you, but it will boost your spirit meter and drain your enemy's. More on this later. 2) Combat is simplified compared to Nioh. While you can still equip two ranged and two melee weapons, you don't have light and heavy attack buttons anymore. Instead you have normal attacks and spirit attacks, which cost spirit meter and do heavy damage to enemy spirit meters. Weapon skills are tied to individual weapons rather than your own skill tree. No stance system either. 3) Fewer stats to level up. You have five stats to put your points into rather than eight. They basically just combined two stats into one for some of these. 4) A much bigger emphasis on casting magic spells. In Nioh, magic was a consumable resource that had to be recharged at checkpoints. In Wo Long, magic is unlimited as long as you have enough spirit energy and your morale level is high enough. More on this in a bit. 5) No stamina meter. Instead you have the spirit meter. It starts at 0 and can go positive or negative depending on actions. Landing attacks and parrying successfully give you positive energy, which you can spend on magic spells or spirit attacks. Dodging, blocking, and getting hit build up negative energy. If your energy goes completely negative, it leaves you staggered and open to attacks. It doesn't take many hits to get staggered either so you really want to get good at parries. On the plus side, your enemies also have spirit meters you can take advantage of to set them up for deathblows. In theory, if you keep attacking aggressively and manage to parry any attempted counterattacks, you can keep your combo going forever without ever getting tired. This is easier said than done, though. 6) There's a morale system, and this one is interesting. Morale is a mechanic that both gives you and your enemies passive buffs depending on how high it is. It goes as high as level 20, at least in the demo. Killing enemies raises morale. Dying resets it. However, when you reach a checkpoint or kill a mini-boss you can plant a flag that will permanently raise your morale and prevent it from going below a minimum rank even after dying. The boss morale is level 20, so this encourages level exploration to plant enough flags to permanently raise your own morale to 20 and put you on even ground. I like this mechanic. 7) There's a jump button! Also, drinking healing potions is very slow, and it kinda feels like you have to be standing still for the input to even register. I get what they're going for but I'm not a fan. They're already getting lots of feedback about this so hopefully they change it in the full release. I imagine the full game will be rebalanced since the same thing happened with the Nioh 2 demo, but I'm pretty much already committed to buying this.

Yeah, I can't believe Robert Zemeckis is attached to this dumpster fire, especially when he's also behind my favorite movie. I know he's not always a winner but usually the man at least tries to think outside the box, but this is so deep inside the box that it's in danger of turning into a black hole.

Pinocchio (2022) The Disney+ remake. Holy fuck I hated this movie. It's a piece of shit. Yeah, I wasn't expecting anything great out of a Disney+ remake and I only watched it to begin with because I'm already a subscriber, but Pinocchio is a great story so I figured at worst it'd be kind of dull and mediocre with maybe a handful of fun moments and the rest of the time me and my friend could make fun of it but this was so utterly soulless that it's probably my most hated Disney remake yet, even more so than the Lion King. Why is it so bad? Well where do I even begin? Absolutely everything is CGI, even things that really didn't need to be. The fucking cat is CGI, as if they couldn't just get a real cat. The clocks in Geppetto's house are CGI. Fucking clocks! Seeing Tom Hanks felt like watching that Will Smith I Am Legend movie where he talks to himself for two hours. Sure, Tom is talking to other characters, but not one of them feels even the slightest bit real. I am way too aware that he is talking to empty space because of how bad they look. Pinocchio isn't even a real puppet before he comes to life. NONE of the puppets in this movie are real. It's all CG all the time and it looks dreadful. It gets worse, though. The story, in fact the entire point of the Pinocchio fairy tale in the first place, is completely butchered. Fuck. This. Movie.

I'm currently working my way through I'm Glad My Mom Died. I think pretty much everyone already knows how rough and exploitive Hollywood is toward child actors but hearing a firsthand account about the ways the author was abused by her stage mom and creeped on by Nickelodeon producers is some real skin-crawling stuff.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) I played it on the Cowabunga Collection, which is probably obvious. This was one of those childhood games I never beat because it was too hard, and I wanted to go back and finally beat the bastard and do it without relying on save states with the exception of one save after level 3 when I wanted to take a break. As a whole, the game wasn't nearly as hard as I expected going back with one exception, and this is mostly thanks to two factors. One: The Cowabunga Collection includes a very helpful in-game strategy guide with maps you can follow so you won't ever get lost if you refer to it. Two: I watched a Youtube guide from U Can Beat Video Games that was full of helpful tips I never knew about as a kid such as pizza farming spots, individual turtle strengths and weaknesses, and boss exploits. The furthest I ever got as a kid was that freaking dam in level 2, but the in-game map made it much more doable. Once you get past the enormous hurdle that is the dam, the biggest danger in the game for the most part is getting lost and worn down in a war of attrition, and with the map always available it becomes much more manageable. However, as I mentioned earlier, there was still one spot where I still ended up using three continues because it was just blatantly unfair. This fucking hallway. Those jetpack foot soldiers are impossible to dodge, take several hits even with Donatello, and their lasers are hard to dodge without backing up, which will just spawn more jetpack soldiers when you go right again. I really couldn't figure out any better way to get through this than just running through it and switching turtles whenever one of them started to get close to death. It is just straight up bullshit game design and if I couldn't exploit an AI glitch to get down the most narrow part of the hallway I probably never would have made it to Shredder. But I did it. Every turtle was on the brink of death by the time I finished, but I finally beat this game decades later.

After seeing No Way Home, I realized just how dumb it was to cover up his face for all his goblin scenes in the original movie. His expressions are just too damn good to cover up with a mask.

I own multiple arcade sticks and I can tell you that it really just comes down to personal preference. I absolutely would not recommend getting one if your motive for doing so is to get better at fighting games, because the whole "sticks are superior" argument is a meme. There are plenty of EVO winners who used the regular old controller. If you just want a more faithful arcade experience, though, then I totally get that. You just gotta pay attention to what kind of parts the stick you're buying is using because they make a huge difference. My first stick was actually a customized Street Fighter stick that swapped out the Hori internals for Sanwa parts and it's been going strong for many years now.

I'm in the same boat with flight sticks. When I was playing Star Wars Squadrons in VR I kept thinking about how much cooler it would be to use a stick instead of a controller, but I couldn't justify it for one game. But imagine...

I could never really get into driving games but I bet having an actual wheel makes a huge difference. I imagine it must be like the difference between playing Guitar Hero with a guitar vs a pad.

Stray Also known as Kitty Simulator 2022. This was an adorable little game. I wouldn't quite call it a walking simulator but it is a very guided experience. The platforming is pretty much automated but I actually think that was the right call here because cats are famously agile and surefooted animals and it would be pretty immersion breaking to have total control over the cat's jumping onto tiny surfaces only to constantly miss and stumble. The gameplay of this mostly consists of interacting with the characters, doing some simple puzzles, a few stealth segments here and there, and navigating your way through environments by finding out where the cat can go that the robot NPCs can't. It's not super deep but it's pretty charming and it doesn't wear out its welcome. I finished it in roughly 5 hours, though that was without hunting down every collectible. The cat's movements and behavior are quite realistic and, while I hate to sound like IGN here, it really does feel like you're playing an actual cat. My favorite thing about the game is how many of the puzzle solutions require you to act like a little asshole. You know, like a cat. You knock things off of shelves, steal things, scratch up furniture, make messes, and just generally do dickish cat things to progress in the game, which I found very amusing. If you're not already a cat lover then maybe you might be underwhelmed, but if you're not a cat lover then why are you playing the kitty simulator to begin with?

Fair enough, although if it makes you feel any better they haven't really sent me anything so far except notifications about updates to the game.

Blow is a blow-hard and Braid is one of the most pretentious and overrated games I've ever played in my life. I still haven't played The Witness because it just put me off so much.

Multiversus also has crossplay across all platforms, which is what the account is for.

Oh yeah the writing was phenomenal. I still remember my favorite bit of dialogue in the whole game that sticks with me even now.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 Got this in the last Steam sale. It's a good bit longer than the first game, and while it's been a while since I played the first one it also felt harder, sometimes to an annoying degree. The later boss battles in the game are pretty brutal and the checkpoints are pretty far back, which is faithful to the days of the NES, sure, but that doesn't stop it from being annoying as shit to have to redo several screens of punishing enemies and platforming every time you lose a life before you can tackle the boss again. You also have to beat the game three times to get the true ending, and I'm never a fan of this kind of padding, but to be fair each playthrough does have some slight differences so that replaying the same levels isn't EXACTLY the same. Despite these complaints I'd still say it's a pretty good game. The playable characters all feel unique and useful in their own ways (although Zangetsu feels underpowered), the levels are well designed with branching paths and shortcuts to explore, the bosses are challenging, and the music is good. A nice throwback for fans of classic Castlevania.

Believe me, you aren't missing much.

I will never forgive Netflix for canceling The Dark Crystal

Are you telling me that the correct pronunciation was "Yoobisoft" this entire time?

Yakuza 3 is definitely the low point of the series. I still wouldn't say 4 is as good as 0 or Kiwami 2, but it never felt like a total slog for me to get through like 3 did at least. Some think 5 is the best one. I wouldn't go that far but it probably is the best one that isn't 0 or 7. Yakuza 6 is divisive because it's a lot smaller in scope and less ambitious than 5 but I thought it was fine. I could see it being disappointing if you had just come off 5 and were waiting years for 6 to come out since it goes from 5 playable characters back to just Kiryu but it didn't really bother me.

What issues do you refer to?